Lots of Microsoft/MCE news from CES 2006

If you have some spare time I recommend to watch the keynote of Bill Gates at the CES 2006; quite entertaining if you are interested to know how our digital life will evolve in the digital decade. The most humoristic part was were Bill Gates knocked out Steve Ballmer in a boxing game! (view that part only over here)

During the keynote a lot of news regarding Windows Media Center Edition has been announced. Check out Charlie Owen’s post for a wrap-up. My Media Center totally changed the way I watch TV: I hardly watch live TV nowadays. I mark all the shows and movies that I may want to watch, and when I have time I select the ones that I want to watch at that very moment. Media Center also allows me to take a bunch of recorded movies with me when I’m on the road.

Charlie has even another very interesting post about how developers can write applications that integrate with Media Center. Three application types will be available: add-ins, hosted HTML applications and WinFX XAML Browser applications. The last one is in my opinion a much needed replacement for the hosted HTML applications that are already available on WinXP MCE 2005. During my Christmas holidays I’ve created a Flickr add-in for this platform, and I experienced that writing hosted HTML applications is not that great (lots of scripts and CSS to deal with). By the way, I’m totally into Flickr as well. It’s a great way to store your digital pictures (mine are over here). A pro account ($ 24.95/year) allows you to upload 2GB each month, there are no limits for space. And the best thing is that Flickr has an API, there’s even a .NET wrapper  (I’m using it in my MCE add-in). Robert Scoble was right, Microsoft should have bought Flickr, but Yahoo did. Maybe that’s why there are rumours that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo? :-)

2006 will be an exciting year!